Only From The Mouth Of…
by kik3593
Summary: My first fic here! Story of 2D escaping from Plastic Beach and some other escapades, in the style of a journalistic interview. Rated T for mild amount of language and drug references. I do not own Gorillaz.
1. Part 1

**So the regular disclaimer: I do not own Gorillaz, they are property of Jaimie Hewlett and Damon Albarn, I think.**

**This is my first fic here, and the first fic of its kind here in a while, as far as I've figured out. To explain: my best name for it is journalistic fiction, or fictional journalism; think of one of those 10-20 page articles in journals and magazines. Being like that long, I'm going to split it up into parts/chapters. This is based on everything Gorillaz up to Murdoc's Xfm Radio Show, so Wobble St. and DoYaThing do not exist in this universe. **

**I'm not too good at tailoring my work. I am scarred from worshipping Hemingway, my grammer-Nazism can lead to very passive, apologetic and/or windy grammer, I exaggerate sometimes, and I'm very Type A, so if it reads as too 17th-early 20th century, you know some of the causes. And you should know where to note it: reviews. **

**Yes, please review. No reviews won't stop me from continuing, but you know as well as I do that reviews help sooooo much.**

**One more thing, I'm very slow with my work. I'm no ladyxa or YourRhineStoneEyes, but I will not cease until I'm done here, so there.**

Only from the Mouth of…: Gorillaz singer is found and speaks.

In a dark, red room that appeared as though it were a cross between a studio apartment and a hotel room, high up enough so that the outside bustle magically sounded just like a whisper, sounds of an electric razor at work were coming from the lit bathroom. I had a recorder in one hand that was stretched out across the desk at which I sat. My other hand was on my knee, and my legs were like stone to the floor. I was acting dramatic, alert, almost dutiful, likening to a pet hound.

The buzzing stopped, followed by sounds of the whitish tap water as it flowed and splashed. That stopped, and after a minute, the door opened, and he turned off the bathroom light as he stepped out. "Sorry 'bout that," the slouching, six-foot-two stick-like figure said as a response to the further darkening of the room. "On'y a moment," he added as he walked over to the curtains.

He then proceeded to flick a few switches, at which half of the room lit up.

The change, from moussed-wavy, sprayed-gray hair to a fresh-looking crop of the exposed roots, which maintained the recognizable light blue color, appeared at the very least theatrical. He looked more serious now, also less morose and exhausted as before; but all the same he went over and plopped down across the large bed. Lying on his back, he bent his head backwards to look at me upside down and saw the recorder. With a grunt of realization, he rolled over and sat up on the bed, facing me. "Right," he said, and with a touch of nervousness in his voice: "I 'ate to say it, but I 'aven't done 'is in a while."

His black eye sockets widened and tightened as he stretched and contorted his face to exercise himself for the stretch of time. The two of us exchanged friendly snorts before I asked him my first prompt question.

The missing animated, alternative musician and vocalist Stuart Tusspot, nicknamed 2D, but also known as Stuart Pot and Stu-Pot, has been found, and he is undertaking to reveal himself to the public. The animated singer and multi-instrumentalist of the internationally renowned virtual band Gorillaz had for the past few months been missing and presumed dead, until now; his sudden appearance, however, is marked with little surprise, as most presumptions about the band Gorillaz in the past have been proven incorrect as well as perpetually surrounded by ambiguity. In other words, most people knew better than to commit to any side or point on the matter. Most of them instead write down their imagined possibilities in fanfics.

Up until now, the metaphorical submarine that is the virtual band Gorillaz had once again submerged into an ocean of ambiguity, and, once again, under the circumstance of their "leader," the animated bass-guitarist Murdoc Niccals. Mr. Niccals has in the past perpetrated drastic measure after drastic measure in order to serve his band but also his various modes of temporary satisfaction, belief, and quality of life, all of which have also served as only temporary. These actions—which include murder, assault, arson, alcoholism, abduction, fraud, jailbreaking, satanism, vandalism, egotism, and many more things in between—have succeeded in separating the band for a total of three times now, once following the release of each of their first three, internationally bestselling studio albums.

Niccals, the self-proclaimed satanist, in his most recent broadcast of his "Pirate Radio" show, now situated in Hawaii, claimed that the band's split-up followed their reunification very closely this time, occurring, as the inebriated musician has asserted, on his conglomerate-like dominion, Plastic Beach, while it was under an attack of sea- and air pirates led by a sentry from Hell—a sentry from Hell who has been labeled with many titles, such as "Flatulence" by Gorillaz artistic director Jamie Hewlett, but more prominently nicknamed "The Boogieman" by Niccals himself; and although Niccals constantly puts that the being was out to take his soul to honor the satanic contract he'd made with the demon Beelzebub, and that he'd had the enigmatic creature evangelized/exorcised, "The Boogieman" remains another total ambiguity conjured by Mr. Niccals' consequence, never once having spoken.

Mr. Niccals had provided the only real account for the fate of Plastic Beach and the band members of Gorillaz, as well as the many collaborators on their third album, which is aptly named "Plastic Beach". The large, pink, mushroom-like mass was said to have been destroyed and sunk into the nowhere of the sea.

Various coordinates, given over radio broadcasts, produce nothing but shades of blue on satellite cameras.

Noodle, the Japanese lead guitarist and youngest member of the band (8 years old when she joined, now around twenty), who had disappeared during the release of Gorillaz' second studio album, "Demon Days", faced similar air pirates while at sea and was stranded with spare possessions; Russell Hobbs, the band's large, obese hip-hop expert and drummer, had swum out into the sea and been mutated into a giant, and became Noodle's rescue. According to Mr. Hewlett's rendering of events on Plastic Beach in his storyboarding of the planned music video for their single "Rhinestone Eyes", Mr. Hobbs and Noodle staggered through the sea to the pink landmass in order to reunite the band; this has been open to much speculation, as these are, at best, literally artistic sketches; Mr. Niccals stated that Mr. Hobbs immediately shrank back to his original size upon stepping onto the island, that Noodle destroyed his "Cyborg Noodle", a volatile, artillery-toting copy he had made from her DNA for a guitarist and bodyguard, and that the two's whereabouts, following the proclaimed destruction of Plastic Beach, are once again unknown.

The collaborators have managed some way off of the no-man's land. After participating with Gorillaz and Damon Albarn and members of The Clash in the Escape to Plastic Beach World Tour, the collaborators disbanded and returned to their own businesses. Music veteran Bobby Womack, for instance, who provided vocals for the tracks "Stylo" and "Cloud of Unknowing", as well as a track on the fourth, most recent and lesser-successful album "The Fall", has spent his time giving interviews about his experiences recording with Gorillaz, and has clearly been jumpstarted to resume his musical work, now preparing his own album for release. The more-recent British pop star, Daley, who provided his vocals for the single "Doncamatic", couldn't be held back from his many adoring fans, many of whom have petitioned for him to give away locks of his tower-like haircut.

Gorillaz fans, as well as many organizations, musical and otherwise, have been very concerned about the band's kismet, with little to nothing to invest faith in besides Mr. Niccals' account of the end of Plastic Beach—and very few actually trust him after his lying about the death of Noodle in the music video to their song "El Mañana" and many other things. The most anxiety, however, has been provoked over Mr. Niccals' statement that lead vocalist 2D—who I interviewed and became greatly acquainted with over the past week—was eaten by a whale during attacks on Plastic Beach. The singer, also the reason for many of the fans of Gorillaz, was kidnapped by Niccals after refusing to collaborate with him on a third major Gorillaz studio album, and was held in an underwater room on Plastic Beach, around which swam a whale that Mr. Niccals had "hired" on discovering that 2D had a case of cetaphobia, a fear of the aquatic mammals. The repetitive escape attempts he made proved futile, recapture following every time. The bassist's story follows along with the events in the "Rhinestone Eyes" storyboard—which still is also rather dubious—in which a whale is seen charging at 2D's underwater room and biting the island before being grabbed and hurled at the aforementioned pirates by giant Mr. Hobbs. He was presumed as simply "gone" by Mr. Niccals in his radio broadcast from Hawaii.

The self-revealing of Stuart Pot once again greatly disparages the very little reliability of his cohort Mr. Niccals. "That bloke says I don't got a thought in me 'ead," he said to me on Friday, "but in fact he's the one who don't know anything. Tha's why Gorillaz's always really worked like a sod who don't know wha' 'e's doing. And that's why it's such a slow creative process, because our 'leader' does the least work; really, he don't do shi' when it comes to working with others."

Mr. Pot spent a good part of the interview talking about the abusive behaviors of Mr. Niccals. "This interview here should in fact be a big hit. Of course people don't know the half of Gorillaz, or Murdoc. Murdoc spends as much time as he can hogging up to a microphone and saying wha'ever, and 'alf of it is lies." When I asked him about what of Murdoc's statements were true, he immediately replied, "Oohh…that's a—a big question," popped a pill into his mouth and, a few moments later, said "Gimme a minute."

**There you go, that's the first part. This was very sum-up, but from now on Stuart talks a LOT more.**


	2. Part 2

**Here's Part 2!**

Stuart Pot considers his escape a miracle, admitting that he wasn't capable of engineering such a plot. "Unlike with Noodle, I wasn't gettin' out in any conspiracies with Muds," he said, recalling the controversial "El Mañana" music video shoot, as well as the nickname the band had coined for their bassist. "So, well, duh, I knew I was going to need help. From someplace, I 'unno…I heard Muds got a decoy to stand in 'is place and then just left. I wished I'd thought of that."

What Mr. Pot did have to his advantage were two prime things: first, that the surveillance camera to his room had grainy visual and no sound, and second, his mechanical abilities and endeavors were amplified by his very own Doncamatic device. "The Donkatron—er, Doncamatic, it's known as now—that's what Daley was calling his anyway—this device was just like a miniature of Russel's—my mate—Russel's Hip Hop Machine; I mean, the whole idea is sound; only this time, I wasn't archiving sound, or making another The Fall album, or something. This time, I was, well, utilizing it. I was making, sor' of, phone calls, basically; an SOS."

Mr. Pot's Doncamatic device, he explained to me, is truly a universal device—"well, a' leas' on Earth, tha' is"—in that it can create and manipulate sound waves in any frequency. "An' i's all just mainly because I'm a mechanical wiz with electronic instruments," he boasted. "I'm not joking. All I need is a bi' of sound, and then I can do a ton of things with it. That's what real musicianship is. It's fanks to that my father was a mechanic, o' course. We used to customize piano keyboarded instruments all the time together, when he was alive. Otherwise my mind would turn to jello at the inside of a keyboard. Uh, oh yeah, and I also sometimes got wifi on my computer, for some reason, so I sometimes could use my iPad to send out video messages to whoever I was sending out messages to. I would just say what was on my mind. Stuff like 'Help me please!' or 'Hello? Is anybody there? Hello?' or once, 'Talk to me, talk to me, talk to me, talk to me, talk to me!' But yeah, that rarely happened…"

With his device, Stuart Pot sent out various signals and messages from his underwater room of the rotten junk island. "I 'ad to work manually. I had to to send the messages by aiming the signals at the bottom of the ocean, and then they would bounce back up, because if I sent them upwards or straightways, then Muds would've picked them up easy on radar or somefink. Still, he was intoxicated, or high or both whenever I saw him, so I dunno know how much it would've mattered. He was like that at dinner, or recording sessions, or when we went swimming or anything. I think it was just the stench was getting too much to him. There was no running water, or soap, or…stuff…"

Mr. Pot sent out messages to many of his cohorts, including Damon Albarn and Jaimie Hewlett, both of whom in return offered little help. "Those blokes even said they might come to that damn place and bring a party or somefing! They had no clue about what was happening to us!" Stuart sent messages to as many people as could think of. "With the amount of stuff coming basically out of the arse of Plastic Beach, I'm surprised no one picked anything up or came down to ask or check about ruckus or all. Except that Cyborg Noodle. She'd come down, routine ev'y day, to watch me, an' act blank an'—an' creep me out for half and hour or so."

Stuart received very few replies, as he feared; most of these messages were probably disregarded as Gorillaz promos, and very few people would likely even know how to reply. "I'm sure I messed up a few myself, so they never reached their destinations, but only a few." Slightly dejected, Stuart had few options. He made a few more failed escape attempts before being forced to accommodate the whole Gorillaz-collaboration group on the Escape to Plastic Beach World Tour, in which he was infamously stuck in dressing rooms with Murdoc and the Cyborg Noodle concert after concert. "That was just about the worst leg of the 'journey'. Murdoc was always freaking out and goin' on rampages, and he would tear the nobs off of every door he could find, and I had to find someplace to just hide before the people could get us out. In Toronto I actually dumped the dirt out of a big flower pot and I hid there for about half the time. I think he might've killed a custodian lady at the O2, she's still missing, they said…"

Upon returning to a Plastic Beach that was now surrounded by pirates, Stuart knew that he'd had enough. He was more than sure that Murdoc had something to do with the bad business of the ambiguous Boogieman that was appearing wherever they went and would later come to terrorize the island as is depicted in the "Rhinestone Eyes" storyboard. Murdoc had also swiped Stuart's iPad away from him and downloaded the entire "The Fall" album to use for his "Pirate Radio" show, slapping a Gorillaz label on it when Stuart had been hoping to keep it for himself. "That was very personal work I'd done there, and he had no right to it whatsoever. I don' care that it go' very well received. I mean, part of me is glad, because I'm really happy to see fans and people and such, being made happy, with this music that I made, but on the Murdoc side of it, it don't mean anything to me. My privacy was violated, _again_, only this time on a fucking larger scale than before. I mean, killing someone or beating someone up or trying to barf all over Cameron Diaz is one thing for me, but pirating music, and my personal stuff, yeah, I think _that is_ really going overboard ("heh, tha'll make a good pun," he commented afterward). So whether I could or couldn't, I felt like I had no choice but to get away." (Stuart here emphatically tapped the air with a pointed finger before folding his arms together and crisscrossing his legs on the bed.)

Niccals' only compensation for his bout of music piracy was to let Stuart appear on his Pirate Radio show, on the last two episodes that would be produced at Plastic Beach. He still took the liberties of slapping, punching and chloroforming Stuart whenever he felt like it. "I was in a better mood the second time around because the first time—on 'Episode 4', right—he dragged me out of bed at 4:36 in the morning—that's, er, 12:36 Greenwich Time, I think—and the one run we took was really bad. He didn't know what to do with me, and I really just wished he wasn't there at all, so he knocked me out. But the second time I came on I was in a much better mood—it was daylight, first of all, and a bunch of the collaborators sat me down and we talked over Murdoc stealing the music and having abducted more than half of us, and so I felt a bit less raw about it. I guess they basically buttered me up for the show—which was nice of them—and I went on and me and Murdoc did the show, an' I redid all the sound mixing in fron' of 'im, and we worked with each other a lot better, despite all the projectiles and such flying at us from these sodding pirates. Looking back though, I'm still pretty sore with him, and not just because of the music piracy and 'bad contact' and such. Oh, an' also there was those other things, like the iTunes interview (at this he shuddered and scrounged his face). Maybe I'll make up with him later, but I was so sick of all the crap I'd gone through in that whole year that I just didn't see the point anymore. I guess I thought to myself, if Gorillaz was something this scattered, with i's band members literally not knowing the 'alf of what was going on and not being able to make music together, and if they were reduced to something like stealing music from one another, then I really saw no point to calling myself Gorillaz anymore. I was through with it. It was a commitment that felt like suicide, but I'd never felt so sure about something in my life—uh, well, besides my love of music. So I decided to try, just one more time…An' it worked! Under strange circumstances…"

The siege on Plastic Beach in fact became Stuart's savior. Straight after Niccals' fifth broadcast, Stuart bolted from the mansion and out onto the island as Plastic Beach was assailed by gunfire and cannonballs. Having no plan at all, and being lucky to have gotten this far, he was even more dumbstruck to see a squat submarine approach and pull up to the island. Out popped Daley, and the pop tenor singer stretched his hand out to the skinny baritone. "I was a little skeptical, but then I thought, 'Well, a singer to another singer, maybe I can trust he's not working for Muds.' And I got in, and we took off. Apparently, _HE'D_ gotten one of my SOSs, to'ally by accident, of course. Think of 'at? I just dunno, I would never have thought of asking another person on that island to help me. Though it makes perfect sense now, I guess I'd just lost a sense of brotherhood by then, in anyone I had met on Plastic Beach. I guess you'd call it a sense of anti-brotherhood I'd gotten."

I asked him if he blamed Murdoc for that, and he said, "For the most part, yeah…but really, I just had to get away from everything going on there. So anyway, yeah, that's what it was…that's what Plastic Beach was like."

**That's Part 2!**


	3. Part 3

**This took some time, so might the next chapters. The first two were written a long time ago, I just needed to freshen those up a little. Some of this was already written too, but most of it is coming to you hot off the press. Consequently, it might not be very good…**

Stuart dyed his hair following his return to the real world. Using color hairspray, the hair went from light blue to silver-gray and and hardened together, looking as if it had been moussed. "I was anxious to get back to the real world, bu' ih hit me that I would probably be hit with everyfing if I showed my real face in public. And 'en Murdoc would find out for sure where I was. So I sprayed my hair whitish gray, so I'd look like one of those anime cartoon characters from _Naruto_ or somefink. It worked like a charm. An' also, Daley pointed out to me that I looked like a cosplay fanboy, so I guess that helped, too. I wore sunglasses, too, those cheap, weird color-glass ones that they sell in stores an' on streets an' 'en break easy, I was always buying more. I couldn' really change ma voice, buh no one really no'iced. The 'air an' the sunglasses, 'at seemed to do ih. An' jackets, I wore jackets instead uh just t-shirts."

After a brief tour of a return to England, with visits to his hometown, the ruins of Kong Studios, London and Manchester, Stuart went abroad. "I was going to try my hand at backpacking. I wasn't too good at it, though. I was getting tired all the time."

Stuart went through France, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and the Netherlands and Belgium, finally winding up in Germany, where he found a temporary job in a small music store. "I came to Bayreuth, while they were doing their annual Wagner Festpiel thing, and I met some people who I followed back to their home in Berlin, and I worked showing all the instruments. Of course, I was always getting carried away, telling people about all the other instruments that weren't in the shop, but I think the people liked me. They were this close knit group of friends, and they let me stay at their houses and they kept me fed and all that. I became a kid for them. Oh, and also I learned German. _Ich kann viele gu'en Deutsch sprachen_!" he said proudly, still retaining a Cockney accent.

Stuart left after a while, occupied by other things. "I knew I wasn't fit with just staying in a music shop. Tha's what I did before Gorillaz, and it never satisfied me. Sure, me and my _Freunden_, we'd play music sometimes, but they were never serious enough abou' it. They knew how to fix and sell instruments and how to play 'em, but that was all they really knew, the technical side of music. Barely that, even. They never got really serious about music-_making_. So I left, and I tried to…keep busy. An' for a while, nuffin' worked…"

Stuart, after leaving Berlin, found a job at Fruit Ninja, where he took the task of throwing fruit up in the air to be sliced by gamers. He was fired shortly after he was told he wasn't throwing the fruit high enough. "It was tiresome work nonetheless," added Stuart. "I worked my arse off for them. I can't even tell you how many times I almost got a finger or a hand sliced off by those idiots who just swing at the bottom of the screen."

Being in the United States, he next tried out for Broadway, only to be kicked out because he couldn't "drop the English accent". "I'm over that stuff now. It was a good decision to jus' leave New York. I di'n wanna work the way they work there, trying ta make a name for 'emselves. You know what they have now on Broadway? A Jonas brother! Noodle an' Russel, they laughed themselves to pieces when they heard that, but I wasn't very surprised, 'cause I'd kinda understood that they'd do something like that, and why they'd do it…

"New York was just overall sad to me, for a couple'f reasons. Looking back at it now, I jus' wanted to make music an' sor' of not be bothered by all these…people, I guess. I hated this idea of stardom. Because I had been a star, an' then I'd realized in New York that I'd been doin' what I loved most, but at the same time I was jus' parading with all these other blokes an' birds who were sayin' the same fing…an' that I couldn' do anything abou' ih. We, as Gorillaz, were always trying to tell people that this celebrity culture was bad; an' it was like nobody had 'eard us. An' I thought, this was because we'd become what we were fighting all the time. We'd been absorbed into this culture of hoaxes. It was like being in the Feel Good Inc. tower, watchin' worlds pass us by while we're trapped in some corrupt deluge upon consciousness. I found out we had failed, plain an' simple…"

Stuart spent a few days brooding in Manhattan, trying to figure out what to do next, also trying to figure out how to figure out what to do, exploring a mass of options. He wandered the streets of Manhattan at all hours, feeling nothing but alienation. He tried jogging with groups in Central Park mornings and afternoons, but he could never keep up and would run out of breath. He went into numerous piano, guitar and musical instrument shops to play music randomly, only to be thrown out after a few trance-like hours by employees or owners. He visited and walked through numerous museums, art galleries, parks, landmarks like the Brooklyn Bridge, Lincoln Center, Houston Street, Grand Central Station and Battery Park—"those are all great places for doin' wha'ever. See, New York has great places, i's jus' all these people tha're crazy or annoying or afflicted, or dumb. But I figured it out. The fact is, they were being _made_ crazy, annoying, afflicted and dumb by all these parts coming together, this "Melting Pot", which isn't really melting a' all. It was like its own Plastic Beach, really, tho conglomeration that no one knows what to wiff it. Most people in Manhattan don't stay for long because they're tourists, an' the city jus' starts changing them, and then people who do stay there become these…other people, people that can' stand looking at anyfing."

"An' then, one day, it jus' clicked to me. I finally decided to take the subway—that's the Manhattan Tube—, right, for the first time, an' I went to the train station stairs going underground. An' right when I was about to step down, there was this enormous rush of people coming out of the subway! For the first time in a few weeks, I finally felt really dumbstruck, like whenever I really felt like making music, like writing songs, or singing…forever. I almost always felt that way, but ever since Plastic Beach, I've only fel' it like in explosions. It's this weird, eternal feeling. These people were passing me like for hours, an' I jus' stood there and they all passed by me! It was like Jamie's video for "Phoner to Arizona" and being on that crazy long tour through the States. So I decided. Why not try to find that feeling again? I took a Greyhound bus out of New York and and started hitchhiking all around America. It felt amazing after being in New York. I felt like Jack Kerouac, on'y I was a musician. I was gonna write another album doin' this, like before. I was gonna make music to jus' make music, for me."

**Cliffhanger, again! Yeah, sorry, I wish I had more, but I'm working on it. So hard! Anubis, I hope I maintained the accent!**


End file.
